NAT GEO MARS GETS READY FOR SEASON 2 | NYCC 2018

Automatically transcribed; may contain errors.

how are you all doing today I'm good thank you so you guys are new to season two correct so what can you tell us about your characters I have to tell you I binge-watched it because I started watching and I couldn't stop I loved it so much so yes tell me every well you saw it no no I saw the season one I want season two well we show up to Mars and it gets decidedly less attractive so that's a downer is that possible all right Evan yeah what what what's the question again I totally lost it tell me about your character what's happening or fied bus driver on Mars that's really my my duty okay no I'm not joking you'll see me in the bus a lot yeah have you been practicing out here in New York chopper driver - yeah - but no yeah we come in as the basically like a mining crew and we start messing up stuff I think stuff gets messed up I think I can say that yeah so for you you first of all play two different roles on the show how difficult is that for you it's a little bit schizophrenic it can be it can be but it's a lot of fun - you know everyone's got a duality right so it's fun to play play around with that so at the end of season one we thought that this was over and all of a sudden they found life on Mars so where do we go from there well you know on the show we found life on Mars and in real life we found life on Mars so that's that's really exciting where do we go from there I mean season two is basically about the season one was about can we make it there can we survive there and yes we deployed the a dome and we created a habitat season two is about can we survive there and can we survive there with a new colony with a new commander who is there on a bureaucratic level to exploit the planet can science survive with you no it's less about like individual survival once your attentions so we're just gonna have to I know I'm sorry but he's a nerd so it's okay so Justin you're known a little bit more as a documentary maker and part of this show is about documentary which I love so how do you bring that aspect into cutting it with a drama essential well the whole concept for the show sort of began as a doc when we began season one we were embedded at SpaceX and we were really intrigued by what what they were doing from a technology standpoint and and also really from an adventure standpoint as it relates to the human experience so we started thinking about how do you bring literally that human experience to life in a dramatic way and that led us to start thinking about dramatis izing the futuristic portions of the show so that was the original conceit what was great about season two I think season 1 in some ways was an experiment just to sort of no one had kind of done that sort of thing before and we learned so much in the making of it that when we got the opportunity to do a season two and were able to bring in D Johnson who's is you know amazing dramatic showrunner we could sit from the beginning and say now that we know how these two pieces the documentary and the drama can work together let's engineer that from the ground up so we were able to have our documentarians out in the field collecting stories and at the same time feeding that back into the writers room so as our writers were then writing they knew exactly what we were shooting in the documentary so made the editorial a lot easier so and for the documentary part really the first season was about 2016 pretty much are we going to move forward to 2018 now we're gonna get some that we're gonna still be in 2016 when we're watching them progress in terms of technology know the doc really does mirror what's happening today and it's in some ways really ripped from the headlines because we're focused a little bit on technology but we're much more focused on the clash between private enterprise and science and environmental issues as a result of that so we're in the Arctic where drilling is a big issue we're inside the area where there's a an outbreak you know of virus we're looking at even the policies of our own country right now and making a statement about that in a way so it really is focused on the human experience and it very much mirrors what's happening and for better or for worse what's happening on this planet right now what are you most excited about for season two just the scale and the scope of it we really got to expand the size of the of the colony so from a visual effects standpoint you really get to see a lot more of it so that's kind of fun it still feels claustrophobic but you get a sense of if we actually had a base there and there were 200 people living there and then there's another colony that that arrives what does that actually look and what does that feel like how do they communicate how do they transport materials back and forth and you get to see more and more that so that's that's kind of exciting yeah very excited for season two thanks for talking with us all right so you are the showrunner of this fantastic show that is a really kind of brown groundbreaking because it's part documentary and part drama so we talked a little bit to Justin about melding the two so talk to me a little bit about that well I probably should I came on season two I can't I come from a very scripted background and it was both challenging and incredibly rewarding to do because what we did in season two is we just worked super closely with our documentary partner documentary partners to develop storylines that they could sort of butt up against him supplement in ways that were thought-provoking and informative it didn't stop action necessarily so it's a real challenge but I I'm really pleased with the results fantastic we're very excited about it so we talked a little bit to some of the cast and to new crew members coming on and they're starting a whole you know mining thing so talk a little bit about that part well one of the things that once we were in season two we were gonna have been there for a while our our one colony which is great and it's expanded but everybody has the same agenda ultimately he's about it was science oriented and we wanted to mix it up this year because in life it would happen whether it's been on earth or there you're gonna get people who are there with another agenda and so that's how we launched the season by bringing a private enterprise it has a very different sensibility and a very different agenda and see on a planet where there's no government necessarily there's no 911 no anything just these two colonies how are they gonna make how they gonna work together it gets a little more political in season two it gets political in the in the sense that everything is political here too you know I mean you have industry you have science and those things ideally work together and less than ideally you know combat each other and we just wanted that seemed like a natural thing to explore on a pristine planet so I asked Justin what what he was most excited about so tell me what you're most excited about for season two I am most excited about just being in this year being able to sort of dig into character more and seeing how the long-term presence on the planet not only affects the planet but affects the people who have been there forever because that to me one of my biggest areas of interest is you know as a writer you're always thinking well what would it be like for me if I put myself in that situation how would it be and I and I yeah then we wrote to that like what would I need to survive there not go bananas and if you watch the season you know the answer alright well thanks so much I'm really excited for season two Stephen as the science advisor for the show how do you marry the the technical aspect with still making it understandable for the layperson well you bring human nature to the science so you you know people are people and people do crazy things no matter how carefully they think about science so it this shows a lovely mix of people being people in an in an in an environment that is heavily reliant on science and technology so that's fun are we getting any more science at this point that we don't already technically know about are we kind of doing a little bit of make-believe at all or is it still all just Tecna Oh science we took a couple of risks all of the all of the fiction in the program as opposed to what the interviews of people like Andy and me are all of the fiction that's in the program is based very strictly on what we know about science now it's theirs we're not not taking any chances with two exceptions one chance we took was that there really are Mars quakes on Mars and that after while we were shooting turned out to be true fortunately and we took a chance on what 99% of all Mars geologists think but had not proven that there was liquid water on Mars and you know one satellites observation since then looks like there's at least a lake 12 miles long of water on Mars but we don't know for sure that that's true yet but those are the only leaps of faith that we took but those are based on really good scientific guesses all right so Andy tell me a little bit why do you feel we are so fascinated with Mars well I think it's kind of the next obvious place to go right we've been to the moon the Mars it's also kind of like Earth's you know twin although Venus is really ours twin although to a lot of people you know Earth's blue Mars is red or the Mars over there Mars is eminently more visible than Venus because Venus is all sorts of kill you and so I just think people are fascinated by it also we have about a century of fiction that just seems to revolve around Mars and Martians and stuff like that so it's always been on people's minds as the next kind of awesome place to go I heard you say there's someone that you would not want to go to Mars why not because I'm not brave I I'm not an astronaut I'm not I'm not I'm I do not have the right stuff I want to go I want to sit around in my nice safe little environment and live my happy little life I I'm not an explorer he is he'd go to Mars in a second but don't you think kind of writing a story and hoping that people will want to read it and it'll get published isn't that being a little bit brave not as brave as actually going out into space there's very little chance I'm gonna die of decompression as a result of a you know of a bad review right very true what are you guys excited for for season 2 I'm I'm really excited about the fact that there are more people on Mars and that it looks like it's viable to have more people on Mars and then we're developing an infrastructure for an even larger society on Mars Mars doesn't work unless you have about a million people there eventually it's not self-sustaining you don't have enough people to build the infrastructure that you need and for people to support each other so I'm very excited about the fact that all of a sudden it's not just six people who've landed on the planet and boy are they in trouble it's now a cooperative group of several hundred people working together to build a new society well thank you we're really excited about season two I appreciate you talking with us today [Music] you [Music]